If you ignore the technical aspects of SEO, all the hard work you have poured into your website can be sabotaged. If you have been facing low website performance on google rankings, here are nine tips to consider. These tips should allow you to find any shortcomings that might be holding your website back.
Index Status
To appear on the search results, your web pages need to be indexed. The first step is to check if your pages aren’t accidentally blocked from indexing on google. Google Search Console is the best tool to check the index status of your webpages.
Check how many pages have been crawled by Google, every month the page count should increase, as you add more content to your website. Further, test the robot.txt file to ensure your web pages are not disallowed. If the pages are marked as “disallowed”, google is not crawling these pages.
Use Google Search Console to identify any site and URL errors of your website. You can also check the index status by doing a google search with “site:” with your domain address identify if the pages google has indexed.
Security
Securing your website is essential to rank better o the search engine, as Google prefers encrypted website with HTTPs more than the ones that are not. Use SSL certificates to switch to HTTPS on your website. HTTPS allows secure communication with encryption to a server.
Meta Data
Ensure that your metadata does not include a NoIndex meta tag; if its present, that page is blocked from indexing in google. You can check the same by opening the source code of the page and search for <meta name = “robots” content =’noindex”>.
If it exists, it indicated they are marked to be avoided by google. Further, you can use tools such as Screaming Frog as an auditing tool. It allows you to test the status of your website’s metadata.
Backlink Audit
Having high-quality backlinks are still one of the crucial factors in ranking high in search results. Use tools such as search console, and SEMrush to conduct a complete backlink audit of your website. it also helps you keep track of the progress over time.
Site Speed
People generally do not prefer waiting too long for a website to load. Even search engines prefer ranking webpages with better speed on top compared to slow ones. Therefore, ensure your website’s speed is well optimized.
Use tools such as GT Metrix, Google Mobile-Friendly, etc., to test the speed of your website. A good loading speed should be between 3 second or lower. You can lower the website speed by optimizing image sizes, removing a redirect chain and eliminating any bandwidth hogging plugins from your website.
Remove Duplicate Content
Your search ranking can have an adverse effect if there is duplicate content present on your website. It reduces the authority of the primary URL and can impact the ranking on search engines.
A practical method to deal with duplicate content is to use canonical link tags. Canonical tags direct searching engines towards the primary URL of any duplicate pages.
Low-Value Pages
Low-value pages can impact the ranking of your website; hence it’s best to either de-index such web pages or redirect them to pages on your site that contains rich content. This can be achieved by using a 301 redirect.
Internal Linking
While backlinks are crucial, having a good internal link structure can offer significant benefit to your website rankings. Make sure that you link other web pages on your site with rich content and ensure the anchor text is using the same keyword that the page it’s linked with.
Mobile Optimization
Since most of the internet users are present on mobile devices, it is crucial to focus on mobile optimization. Even google ha a “mobile-first’ approach when indexing web pages.
For effective mobile optimization, using responsive design is a must. A responsive design allows a website to adjust to multiple screen size without compromising the quality and experience for the users.
Use Google Search Console identify if your web pages are well-optimized for mobile devices.
